huey and Eye-One Display II monitor profiling equipment

A variety of monitor calibrators are available and these include the Spyder products from ColorVision, Sequel colorimeters rebadged by several suppliers (e.g. basICColor Squid, LaCie BlueEye), the Monaco Optix, and products from Gretag-Macbeth.
We sell two calibrators, both from Gretag-Macbeth:

Which to choose?

The Eye-One Display 2 costs AU$400, while the huey costs AU$140. That's a big price difference - why would you pay the extra for the Eye-One Display? Well, maybe you wouldn't - it's up to you. The huey will not be accurate enough for some people, but for many people it will be more than enough!

So you have to choose one to suit your needs. Both tools work on Microsoft Windows as well as Apple OS X systems.

Using a huey

The huey is a fairly simple device, and doesn't present you with a lot of controls. But you still need to act carefully.

Before you start, if you're using Microsoft Windows and have Adobe Photoshop installed you will need to disable the Adobe Gamma tool. Remove the Adobe Gamma Loader shortcut from the Startup menu (probably under the All Users settings) then reboot, and you should be set!

Once it's measured your screen, you can choose one of a set of modes including "gaming", "photo-editing", "video-editing", etc. It's important that you choose the "Photo" mode: this selects a gamma of 2.2 and a target colour temperature of 6500K, both of which are the common standard.

You can also select to have the huey change your screen as the ambient light changes: this increases the brightness of the screen when the ambient light is high, and drops it when the room lights go off. When I'm using a huey-equipped system I leave this function turned off. If you have the ambient light monitoring enabled but don't have your huey connected, you may find that your monitor mysteriously gets paler and paler as time goes by.

With those things in place the huey does a good job of setting your monitor to a stable state, and calibration/profiling is a quick and easy step so you can redo it often. This is enough for many users browsing the web, printing photos on their home printer (in conjunction with good ICC printer profiles): it's certainly infinitely better than having no calibration at all.
But if you have a fancier computer setup (e.g. multiple monitors) you should consider the more-comprehensive Eye-One Display.